


Potter's field in the Bardo

by Mthaelly



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Logan movie, Other, lol, my first go at fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 05:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14710275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mthaelly/pseuds/Mthaelly
Summary: It was neither day nor night in this minimal space, cold and sullen; the graves of paupers and strangers aligned. The place of her dreams;the Potter's field in the Bardo. Here, she contends with voices, some familiar and some unknown.( In a limbo.)





	Potter's field in the Bardo

( Hear ye, hear ye, a tale, a play if you might, of a daughter fierce and a father benign.)  
  


( He looks old.)  
He doesn't want anything to do with her obviously. When he thought that she was no mutant, he had left her to fend for herself in an old smelting plant; when she had murdered men with similar claws, he gave her an extra penny for a pony ride and tolerated her to the very least. But she is not one to pretend nor be gracious. His layered anger matched by her shooting glare as he reprimands her comic books and what he thinks are cheap fantasies. He doesn't know her, never intends to even with all their biting similarities. No heart, she thinks. An old man, hollowed out with age. Scarred flesh and loose bones wrapped up by aching muscles of a century more.  
( He looks like from a different age entirely.)

( He looks sad.)  
When he stumbles to her, red gore oozing out of his molten skin like heavy drops of dew,he falls like an aging man with cracking bones and snapping limbs. She smells leaking intestine and burning flesh, both from him and the burning van with the fresh corpses. Charles lays on the back of the truck immobile, a cooling body; a final breath then never again in worrisome existence. She screams and struggles and snarls at her bonds, rage and sorrow churning in her marrow.He breaks her manacles with a swipe of his claws. She stares back at him.  
His eyes red and sagging with deep nights of fatigue, his greying hair white in  the stark headlamps of night; skin all teared lest his bleeding flesh like fresh flayed skin.  
( He looks like a corpse.)  
  


( He looks worn.)  
He collapses after they bury Charles. She drags him to a car that she steals and takes him to a doctor. They spat in the car and she punches and yells at him. He yells back. In the end, he drives her gruffly to the coordinates to prove it fantasy. He doesn't really make it though, for his red eyes droop and close every so often. She steers the car to the side of the road and he falls into a sorely needed and troubled sleep. Later, his head rests against her thighs when the sky darkens and the sun begins to set.  
( Frayed at the edge of life.)

( He doesn't look like anything but old.)  
No, not the Wolverine she knew from her beloved comics. The Wolverine she knows is not Wolverine, not an ounce of his strength or tenacity. Not his passioned drive nor his unbreakable stance. The Wolverine she thought she knew is also not Wolverine. It's Logan, dreary and worn down from the testimonies and cruel passing of time. It's her father, breathing hard as if suffocating, telling her about bad dreams and intended suicide. Not heroic epics, no; just a wish once to splatter his own brains against a wall.   
( He doesn't look like anything but sad.)  
  
  
  
  


( She can't know which is which when he intends to let her be.)  
  
  
  
  
  


( He looks pained.)  
That is so obvious she laments to herself. How can he not with all those bullets and cuts and the bloody stump sticking out of him. His voice rasps and drones like the failing of an engine; spluttering, unable to come back to life. She grips on tighter as his grip loosens.  
( She doesn't know.)  
He looks all sad, weary and old.  
She calls him daddy as he calls her name. Sobbing,crying,intimate; ugly.  
His eyes twinkles a little and she can see him twitch a tender smile.  
( He looks happy.)  
He dies.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


( Aye, 'twas most pitiful a tale, the child who mourns the death of an only parent, much beloved for too short a while.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(Her hand shakes but there are no stitches or bruises.)

A decade later, when all had been long done and set she wakes in the middle of the night; trembling and convulsing  hands gripping the sink as nausea overcomes her. Nothing comes out for she is never sick, never left with an unhealed bruise.  
She looks in the mirror for  a spilt second before turning back to the room.  
  
  
  
  
  


( You don't look like anything but sad. Thinks Rictor tells her that sometimes.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  


She saw a pair of boots once when she was young, still a few fresh years beyond his death when she had stayed with an orphanage. They had thrown out the boots of an old gardener who had passed away and lo behold the next day  came a new gardener in a pair of new boots. The others had squabbled to see it and to try it on, to test it's newness when long had they forgotten the old.  
She recalls going to the trash dump that day, looking and staring at that pair of dirty boots, rough at the edges with long dried mud and sand ; the weathered lines of the old gardener's face faded from age.

( Her lips tremble and she starts to cry.)  
  
  
  
  


The other children don't talk to her and she goes to another orphanage.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


( Laura. Laura.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

She doesn't throw anything away. Her old textbooks, her notes and her yellowing letters to persons unknown. She doesn't know anyone that she wants to write to.

" Those papers Laura, I fear a family of mice may come to make a home of it."  
  
  


  
( What of it then, she says.)  
  
  
  


She becomes a teacher, teaching children  at a local school. The children don't like going on her classes much because they can't eat anything or do anything secretly much. They say she is like a wolf in sheep's clothing; senses sharp like a wolf yet somehow bearing meek as a lamb. She smiles softly back at the laughing horde of young children, her hands gripping the edge of the table firmly.  
  
  


( You don't look anything but wearying sometimes Mrs Howlett.)  
  
  
  
  


She downs another shot, the blaring music of the pub ringing in her heightened senses like shards of breaking glass. Another. Another.  
She hears them still, it sounds even louder;pieces of broken things groaning in an empty jar.  
She doesn't count her glasses and when Rictor asks her if she was even sober at all she does not answer back.  
  
  
  


( Ha,how can that be you were never drunk.)

Terribly sober.  
  
  
  


Like the shots of tasteless alcohol she takes from time to time,she doesn't count her days, months or years. She trudges on from one day to another and when her watch breaks she doesn't know till a year later when her colleague tells her. Does it matter,  if I'd choose to idly go by the path of my life with no sense of time nor of its passing?  
  
  
  


( Laura Howlett,  you are long to live, still 23.)  
  


( Why must it be, why must it be? Only twenty three!)  
  
  
  
  


She doesn't fix it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

  
  
  
  


 

**Author's Note:**

> I've just finished this wonderful book called Lincoln in the Bardo and couldn't resist a go  
> .


End file.
